AWS re:Invent 2014: Key Connectria Takeaways

If you’ve been keeping up with us on social media or reading our blog, you may know that we hit the road last month to attend the third annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. As expected, the conference was buzzing with new announcements (10 new AWS services/features!) and filled with informative keynote speeches. We set up a booth at the conference and enjoyed connecting with our existing customers and chatting with prospective partners.

While we wished everyone could have been there to enjoy this event, we thought we’d share some of our key takeaways from re:Invent. We asked a few of our team members, including CEO Rich Waidmann, to reflect on their time spent at this year’s conference. Enjoy!

Rich, CEO and President

“My main takeaway was the difference in user sentiment from 2013 to 2014. Last year, we had a lot of people stop by the booth, but most were still kicking tires on AWS. This year, there were many more people saying they were either moving a substantial workload to AWS, or they were ‘all in’– meaning they were transitioning completely from data centers to AWS.

Last year, AWS still seemed like a bit of a novelty. This year, it was more of a foregone conclusion that companies can run their businesses in AWS. It was the ‘Aha’ moment when it became intuitively obvious that cloud computing, and AWS in particular, is the wave of the future.”

Rusty, COO and VP of Engineering

“There were two big announcements at this year’s conference, Amazon EC2 Container Service and Amazon RDS for Aurora. I feel that Aurora is a direct attack on Oracle by providing higher performance and reliability than MySQL and features found only in an enterprise DBMS.”

Brian, Regional Director, AWS Practice

“I learned that there are not many companies like ours that truly provide 24×7 managed services. Many “managed service” organizations are touting tool management of their infrastructure.”

Brian, Director, Cloud Services

“AWS Configuration provides additional ability to quickly answer “what has changed?” in an environment. You can quickly identify recent configuration changes to your resources by using the console or building integrations. AWS configuration will discover resources that exist in AWS accounts and provide a complete inventory of all resources and their configuration attributes.”

“AWS Key Management Service makes it easier for customers to create and control encryption keys used to encrypt data. Traditionally these were expensive Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) that were available in the past but financially out of reach for some people. Adding security services like this allows more customers to meet regulatory and compliance needs.”

Chris, Cloud Engineer:

“I expect AWS to constantly improve existing services and be innovative as a cloud provider. This year (again) I feel like no other company is producing at this pace. These are incredible tools.”

If you’d like to learn more about Connectria’s Managed AWS solutions, visit us today!